by Penny Jordan
‘Yes. I remember. She’s been working on the air conditioning plans. I gained the impression that she isn’t very popular with her colleagues. Anyone seconded to me in the role I envisage will have to be able to work well with other people.’
‘There is some hostility towards Giselle in that office,’ the senior partner agreed. ‘But it is not her fault.’ He sighed, and then continued, ‘The truth is that Giselle is far better qualified than her colleagues. She graduated with honours and won an internationally acclaimed prize for her final-year project. She’s a dedicated, hardworking professional with the qualifications to have a glittering career in front of her. The reality is that because of the downturn we simply don’t have the work for her here that would put her skills to their best use. She’s extremely loyal, though. An exemplary employee. I happen to know that in her first year here with us she was approached by two different headhunters working on behalf of international concerns. One job offer was in the Arabian Gulf, the other was in Singapore, but she chose to stay with us. She’s only been working on the air con plans because the chap who was doing so before made such a complete hash of things that we had to move him on to something less demanding.’
Saul’s expression had grown more grim with every word of praise the senior partner had given Giselle. Praise for her was not, after all, what he had wanted to hear—but now that he had heard it, and if she was as good as the senior partner was claiming, it would look decidedly odd and unbusinesslike if he refused to have her working for him. Saul was too good a businessman to allow his personal feelings to affect his business decisions. She might not appeal to him as a woman, but as an architect she was apparently very much ‘best in class’. And he simply did not have time to waste sifting through a whole raft of possible candidates with potentially inferior abilities. The reality was that the project needed to get underway and be completed with some speed if he was to make the profit he wanted from it.
‘Very well,’ he agreed, before warning, ‘but if I find she isn’t up to the job then I’ll expect you to take her back and supply me with someone else.’
Having dealt with the senior partner, Saul resolved grimly that if Giselle was to be seconded to work for him then there was one thing she would have to be taught—and speedily. The rules he made she would have to obey, or face the consequences.
‘I imagine you will want the secondment to commence as soon as possible?’ said the senior partner.
‘Yes,’ Saul confirmed. He suspected that Giselle Freeman would want to work for him as little as he wanted her to, and that would certainly afford him a certain amount of cynical satisfaction—that and making sure she knew just how much she had transgressed by stealing the car parking space for which he had been waiting so patiently. He already had a plan to make sure she knew that, though. He had already confirmed that the Human Resources department held copies of the keys to all the company cars, and now the spare keys to Giselle’s car were in his pocket.
Not that he should be wasting his valuable mental energy on Giselle, Saul warned himself. He had far more important things to think about—one of the most pressing of which was the financial problems currently being experienced by his cousin.
Normally Saul enjoyed problem-solving. He thrived on juggling a variety of problems and then finding solutions to them. Doing just that had been his way through the bleakness of his despair in the long months after his parents’ death, when he had struggled to cope with their loss.
They had been killed when a building had collapsed on them after they had gone to the aid of victims of an earthquake disaster in South America. The pain his parents’ death had brought him had shocked him. Like their deaths, he hadn’t been prepared for it. His overwhelming emotion initially had been anger—anger because they had risked and lost their lives, anger because they had not thought of how their deaths might affect him, anger because they had not loved him enough to ensure that they would always be there for him. It had been then that he had recognised the effect the loss of parental love and simply ‘being there’ could have on a child—even when that child was eighteen and officially an adult.
He had sworn then that he would never have a child himself, in case he unwittingly caused it to suffer the pain he himself was suffering. That was when he had also fully recognised just how glad he was that it was his younger cousin who was heir to the family title and lands and not him, that it was on his cousin’s shoulders that the responsibility to do his duty would rest for putting their small landlocked country before his own desires.
Aldo wasn’t like him. He was a quiet, gentle academic—no match for the scheming daughter of a Russian oligarch who was now his wife, and with whom he was so obviously and desperately in love. Poor fool.
Saul did not believe in love. Desire, lust, sexual hunger—yes. But allying those things to emotion and calling it love—no, never. That was not for him. He preferred his emotional freedom and the security it gave him—the knowledge that he would never again suffer the pain he had experienced when he had lost his parents.
Where Aldo thrived on tradition and continuity, Saul thrived on mastering challenges. And the Kovoca Island project was turning out to be a very considerable challenge indeed. Under-funded and over-budget, the original project had contributed to the financial downfall of the island’s previous owner—who, it seemed to Saul, had wanted to outdo Dubai in his plans for the island.
Saul had already drawn a red line through his predecessor’s plans for an underwater hotel, complete with a transparent underwater walkway, and for a road connecting the hotel and the island to the mainland. Just as he had drawn a red line through an equally over-ambitious plan to turn the island’s single snow-capped mountain into a winter ski resort, complete with imported snow.
It was a pity that for now at least he could not draw a similar red line though Giselle Freeman’s involvement in the project.
Everyone else might be celebrating the fact that the new owner of the Kovoca Island had given the go-ahead to the previous owner’s project and was keeping them on as its architects, and were keen to show their commitment by working late into the evening, but Giselle had another client to deal with—which was why right now she was on her way to the car park to collect her car. She would drive over to the shabby offices of the small charity which, having been left a plot of land, was now keen to develop it into a community centre and accommodation for homeless people. The charity had appealed for architectural help with the project and Giselle had taken it on as a non-fee-paying commission, in her own free time, with the agreement of her employers that she could use their facilities.
It was important not only that the new building blended in with its surroundings and provided the facilities the charity wanted, but also that it would be affordable to build and to run, and Giselle had spent a great deal of her spare time looking into various ways of meeting all three of those targets.
Then tonight when she got home she would have to e-mail the matron of the retirement home in which her great-aunt lived to see if her aunt had recovered from her cold yet.
Meadowside was an excellent facility, and its elderly residents were really well cared for, but it was also extremely expensive. The invested money from the sale of Great-Aunt Maude’s house paid half the monthly fees and Giselle paid the other half. It was the least she could do, given what her great aunt had done for her—taking her in, looking after her and loving her despite everything that had happened.
Giselle felt her stomach muscles starting to tense. It was always like this whenever she was forced to think about the past. She knew that she would never be able to forget what had happened. Even now if the squeal of car tyres caught her unawares the sound had the power to make her freeze into immobile panic. The memories, the images were always there—the wet road, the darkness, her mother telling her to hold on to the pram containing her baby brother as they turned to cross the road. But she hadn’t held on to the pram. She had let go. She was starting to breathe too
shallowly and too fast, her heart pounding sickly. The sounds—screams, screeching tyres, breaking glass—the spin of the pram’s wheels as it lay there in the road, the smells—petrol, rain, blood.
No!
As always, the denial inside her was silent, as she had been silent, digging her nails into the palm of her hand. The hand that should have been gripping the pram handle—the hand which she had pulled away, defying her mother’s screamed demand that she stayed where she was, holding onto the pram.
Giselle could see her mother’s face now, and hear her screamed command; she could see her fear, and could see too the sleeping face of her baby brother where he’d lain in the pram just before it had left the pavement, straight in the path of an oncoming lorry.
It was over…over…There was no bringing back the dead. But it could never really be over—not for her. But at least no one else apart from her great-aunt knew what she knew.
Initially after the deaths of her mother and baby brother Giselle had continued to live with her father, an overworked GP, with a kind neighbour taking and collecting her from school along with her own children. That time had been the darkest of Giselle’s life. Her father, overwhelmed by his own grief, had shut her out, excluding her, not wanting her around—as she had always felt—because she’d reminded him of what he had lost. His emotional distance from her had increased her guilt and her own misery.
And then her great-aunt had come to visit, and it had been arranged that when she returned home Giselle would go with her. She had longed for her father to insist that he wanted her to stay, just as she had longed for him to hold her and tell her that he loved her, that he didn’t blame her. But he hadn’t. She could see his face now—the last time she had seen it—as he’d nodded his head in agreement with her great-aunt’s suggestions, gaunt and drawn, his gaze avoiding her. He had died less than six months afterwards from a fatal heart attack.
As a child Giselle had felt that he had chosen to die to be with her mother and brother rather than live and be with her. Even now sometimes, in her darkest and most despairing moments, she still thought that. If he’d loved her, he’d have kept her with him…But he hadn’t.
Not that she’d been unhappy with her great-aunt. She hadn’t. Her great-aunt had loved and cared for her, building a new life for her. Of course it had helped that her great-aunt had lived nearly a hundred miles away from the home Giselle had shared with her parents and her baby brother.
Giselle started to walk faster, as though to escape from her own painful memories. Even now, after nearly twenty years, she couldn’t bear to think about what had happened. Her great-aunt had been wonderfully kind and generous in taking her in, and Giselle wanted to do everything she could to make sure the now very elderly lady was well looked after. Without her job it would of course be impossible for her to find the money needed to keep her aunt in her excellent retirement home. And that meant that, no matter how much she might personally resent Saul Parenti and his attitude towards her, she had to be grateful for the fact that he was continuing with the project and keeping the firm on. These were hard times, and to lose such a valuable source of income would have meant redundancies.
Giselle had never imagined when she had been studying and working so hard for her qualifications that there would be such a deep downturn in the economy—one that would affect the construction industry so badly. She had chosen architecture as her career in part because she had believed that she would always be able to find work. Work—and getting paid for it—were vitally important to a woman who had already made up her mind that she would have to provide for herself financially all her life, because she was determined never to share her life with a partner. And in part she had chosen it because she had fallen in love with buildings—great houses and other buildings owned by the National Trust which her great-aunt had taken her to visit so often whilst she had been growing up.
Engaged in her own thoughts, Giselle headed automatically for her parked car, but as she approached the bay instead of seeing her own car all she could see was the highly polished bonnet of a much larger vehicle in the space where hers should have been. Automatically her walking pace slowed, and then she stopped as she looked round, wondering if she had been mistaken about where she had parked. The click of a car door opening caught her attention. She turned in the direction of the sound, her heart plummeting as she saw Saul Parenti getting out of the car with the long bonnet, the one that was parked where she’d expected to see her own car, and coming towards her.
Her reaction was immediate—a gut-deep instinct that went beyond logic or reason, making her confront him and demand, before she could think about the recklessness of doing so, ‘Where is my car? What have you done with it?’
For sheer blind arrogance he doubted she had any equal, Saul decided, listening to her and witnessing her immediate hostility.
Her response confirmed every judgement he had already made about her, and reinforced his growing determination to put her in her place.
‘I had it removed from my parking space,’ he told her meaningfully.
‘Removed?’ Giselle felt the file she was holding slip from her grasp as the shock hit her, disgorging papers as it fell. ‘Removed?’ she repeated ‘How? Where to?’
She knew her voice was trembling under the weight of her shocked emotions, but as she dropped to her haunches to pick up the contents of her file she was helpless to control it. She hated the effect this man seemed to have on her. She had hated it from their first confrontation and she hated it even more now. It made her feel vulnerable and afraid—it made her behave with a defensive antagonism she couldn’t control. It made her want to turn and run away from him. But most of all it made her so acutely aware of him as a man that she hardly dared even breathe, for fear he would somehow sense how physically aware of him her body was. It wasn’t just the shameful stiffening of her nipples, nor even the shockingly purposeful beat of the gnawing pulse aching through her lower body. No, it was the feeling that a whole protective layer had been ripped from every inch of her skin, leaving it so sensitive and reactive to his physical presence that it was as though he had already touched her so intimately that her body knew him—and still wanted him.
How had this happened to her? Giselle didn’t know. It must be because of Saul himself—because of the intense aura of male sexuality he gave off. No other man had ever affected her like this. It shocked her that she could be so vulnerable so quickly to a man she didn’t know and didn’t think she’d like if she did know him. She’d controlled her emotions and her desires for so long that she’d believed she was safe. She must have let her guard slip somehow without realising it. But she could make things right again. She could make herself safe. All she had to do was keep away from Saul Parenti—and that should be easy enough. At least he didn’t want her. That would have been dreadful. She should be grateful for the fact that he was so obviously furious with her.
‘How?’ he was repeating tauntingly. ‘How are illegally parked cars normally removed? And as to where…’
She’d stepped back from him, giving him a haughty look that suggested his proximity was something she wanted to reject, Saul recognised, and his male pride was now as antagonised by her attitude as his temper. Women did not step back from him. Quite the opposite. They clung to him—sometimes far more than he wanted them to do.
Just for a moment Saul mentally allowed himself the pleasure of picturing Giselle clinging to him, her face turned up beseechingly towards his own. That would be a pleasure? Having her want him to bed her? Was he going mad? There was nothing about her that aroused him sexually, nothing at all. He liked his women softly feminine, not challenging and aggressive. He liked them warm and welcoming, not icy cold and rejecting. The thought of taming such a shrew might excite some men, but he was not one of them.
Having stepped back from Saul to what she hoped was a safe distance from the lure of his sexuality, Giselle managed to drag together the determination to insist, ‘My car was not
parked illegally, and if you’ve had it clamped and towed away then you are the one who is breaking the law.’
Oh, yes, she was definitely a shrew, Saul decided as he bent to retrieve a stray sheet of paper that had fluttered close to his feet. Automatically he scanned the print on it and then paused to read it more slowly before demanding, ‘You’re working on this project free of charge?’
Desperate to retrieve the paper, Giselle reached for it, almost snatching it from him in her fear of accidentally coming into physical contact with him.
‘And what if I am?’ she defended herself sharply. ‘It doesn’t have anything to do with you, and you have no right to question me.’
There she went again, challenging him with her open animosity to him, when by rights she ought to be humbling herself, admitting her previous fault and seeking his forgiveness.
He had, Saul decided, had enough.
The history of his genes meant that he was not a man who allowed anyone to challenge him, and for a challenge to go unanswered was unthinkable. He might not rule Arezzio, but his ancestors had. They had ruled it and held it against all those who had challenged their right to it. Their blood flowed in his veins and those who defied him—in any way—did so at their own risk.
‘You think not?’
The silky tone of his voice had an electrifying effect on her, causing the fine hairs at the nape of her neck to stand on end, her flesh to react as though he had touched it, caressed it.